Pallets for storing and transporting manufactured articles are well known. The most familiar example is the fork lift pallet adapted to establish a platform plane on which the articles are supported, and support runners on the lower side to support the platform runners off the ground to enable some carrying item such as the tongue of a fork lift to be inserted beneath it.
Pallets are a well developed art, but have suffered some rather suprising shortcomings, some of which are only recently becoming appreciated. For example, in the storage of food, these pallets are often set on the floor or transported by mechanisms which themselves are not especially clean. They have been the source of some dangerous contamination. The typical wood pallet is not amiable to sterilization because of the porous nature of the wooden material itself, and because of its lack of resistance to sterilizing agents, such as high temperature steam.
Still another disadvantage of the wooden pallet, is its tendency to gain weight from moisture over a period of time. For example, an oak pallet which when it was built weighed about 50 pounds will frequently weigh as much as 100 pounds after substantial exposure to moisture. The cost of fuel for handling the additional weight and the additional burden on persons who must handle the device are evident.
The provision of fork lifts made of materials which can resist sterilizing agents and thereby be sterilized themselves, such as metal pallets, tend to be very expensive and their methods of construction such as by spot welding have not provided sufficiently reliable constructions for the rough usage to which pallets are subjected. In addition, the cost of a metal pallet made entirely of metal and with sufficient cross-section area to resist the forces to be encountered have been prohibitively expensive.
It is an object of this invention to provide a pallet which can be made of relatively expensive materials used in relatively small quantities but which enable the pallet to resist the exerted forces, combined with an assembly technique which is entirely reliable.